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Crime, like everything else, has been transformed by the digital age. Fraudsters, child pornographers and terrorists, among others, are becoming ever more expert in using digital technologies to commit their offences and cover their tracks.

Not surprisingly, this has created new challenges for law enforcement. Police chiefs across Canada claim investigators do not have the tools to keep up. Many say concerns about privacy have scuttled their attempts to convince politicians to provide them with the cyber-surveillance powers they need to do their job.

As Bob Paulson, commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, puts it, “We’re losing our ability, if we haven’t lost it entirely, to bring the traditional investigative response to technologically facilitated crime because of the misunderstanding, in my view, of the privacy threat.”

This week, Paulson shared with reporters from the Star and CBC News case files he says demonstrate the obstacles his force faces, an attempt to help the public understand the need for new police powers the federal government is currently floating.

The cases are no doubt disturbing, tales of child abusers and wannabe terrorists evading justice. But while they clearly illustrate new and thorny police challenges, they do not establish that the requested powers are necessary or proportionate or to what extent they would endanger privacy or even weaken security.

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Paulson is right that an informed public discussion about these difficult issues is necessary and that the evolving nature of cyber-crime is an important part of that discussion. But a closer look at the requested powers shows that Paulson’s story is not the whole story.

The most controversial item on the RCMP’s wish-list is warrantless access to “basic Internet subscriber information,” digital identifiers the Supreme Court has already said should be off-limits without a judge’s permission. Paulson points out that police don’t need a warrant to acquire information linked to a license plate, so why should they have to get one to access Internet user data? But the two are hardly comparable. Police can glean intimate details from the sort of online data in question.

Paulson further argues that getting a warrant is time-consuming and can cast a chill on investigations. The same, of course, can be said of warrants that allow for the search of a home. Privacy protections no doubt create hurdles for investigators, but surely it doesn’t follow that we should discard them.

Police also want Ottawa to require Internet and telecommunications companies to retain user data like emails and texts and to build intercept capabilities into their networks. Such measures seem to presume that “every person might, someday, do something wrong and thus should be under permanent monitoring,” says Christopher Parsons, of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs. This, he rightly suggests, is “fundamentally at odds with the basic assumption that the (security apparatus of the) state should minimally interfere in the lives of citizens.”

Moreover, as the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and others have argued, by creating a back door for state surveillance, such measures would also increase “the risk that hackers will exploit that back door for their own, possibly criminal, purposes.” The more robust the state’s surveillance architecture, the greater the vulnerabilities to hackers, cybercriminals, hostile foreign actors and terrorists, putting people in danger of identity theft, fraud or worse.

And that’s to say nothing of security agencies themselves. The recent revelation that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service illegally spied on people suspected of no wrongdoing is a timely reminder that expanded powers must be accompanied by expanded oversight.

Despite what Paulson says, the RCMP now has access to more data than ever before. The trouble is that as new technologies have made it possible for the state to dredge and analyze endless streams of information, our security laws have failed to keep pace by imposing needed constraints. In recent decades, and in particular with the passing of the overreaching Bill C-51, the trend has been to expand the powers of the security establishment without offering counterbalancing privacy protections or safeguards against abuse.

It’s strange to hear the RCMP commissioner say that his side of the debate is not being aired, as he told the Star and CBC News this week, when his side of the debate is so clearly winning. The Harper government was committed to expanding security powers with no apparent regard for civil liberties. The Liberals in opposition supported Bill C-51, and despite a campaign promise to undo its most egregious aspects, have yet to change a word. The recent government discussion paper on security issues dedicates far more space to the arguments for proposed new powers than to the risks they pose.

The police will always want new powers to make their important and increasingly difficult job easier. But making things easier for police is not, on its own, enough to guide policy. Lawmakers must determine whether the suggested new powers are necessary and proportionate, whether they are constitutional, whether sufficient oversight and safeguards exist and whether, on balance, they would strengthen our security or weaken it.

The best way to get to the bottom of these questions would be for government to heed the longstanding call of many academics and parliamentarians to submit the current security laws and proposed new powers to a transparent expert review. The public consultation now underway won’t mean much unless Canadians understand, yes, the challenges police face, but also the risks of their proposed remedies, including the threats to personal privacy and security posed by an ever-expanding surveillance state.

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